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Friday, 27 February 2015

We were so lucky to have guests for our gym class on February 17th! The RDC athletes were visiting Mountview to play basketball with our teams at lunch time, but they arrived early and decided to join us for our gym class. So much fun! Thanks RDC!

This is a picture of our beautiful art work from this afternoon. Our inspiration came partly from the amazing rainbow that we saw in the sky on our way to school on Thursday morning. If you look closely at the foreground of each painting you will see a field of shamrocks.

Thursday, 12 February 2015

Here is our latest art project. We looked at some artwork from abstract artist Wassily Kandinsky and then we took inspiration from one of his famous pieces, Farbstudie-Quadrate, to make this heart project. We also incorporated our learning of warm and cool colours into this project.

Today we celebrated Valentine's day. A special celebration of Friendship!

If the afternoon we talked a little bit about friendships. We read the story Enemy Pie by Derek Munson, which lead to a great discussion about what a good friendship is. After the story and discussion we were ready to make our friendship fruit salad. Each student had brought in one small container of a prepared fruit. We talked about words that described what a good friend is. Then I labeled each of the fruits with one of those qualities and told the students we would be adding each of these special "friendship ingredients" to our salad. After we added and mixed all of the great friendship ingredients together we were ready to eat. The best part, the whipping cream on top! The Whipping cream signifies the glue that keeps all of the friendship ingredients together!

Thank you to all of the parents for sending in fruit for our friendship fruit salad. The salad was delicious!

This week we were very lucky to have a special presentation by First Nations Drummer, Richard Cardinal. Richard performed three songs for us. Richard sang in both English and Cree. He also talked to us about his drums and answered questions about when he started singing and dancing. Richard's drum was made from Elk hide which we found fascinating. While Richard was visiting we learned how to do the Round Dance, and we danced to one of his songs. This was a special afternoon for us, as one of our students participates as a "Grass Dancer" at traditional Round Dances and Pow Wows. It was fun for the rest of the class to experience a little piece of his culture. I loved watching how proud he was to share this with us.

This special afternoon was also a great tie in to our hearing and sound unit. I heard many students using science terms such as vibration and vocal cords!

Friday, 6 February 2015

This week we were busy learning about pitch and volume. The purpose of the guitar building activity was to give the students a hands-on learning opportunity. They had to build their instrument and then use their guitar to demonstrate and explain to me the difference between volume and pitch. I met with each student individually to watch and listen to their explanation.

Volume is how loud or soft a sound is. Pitch is how high or low a sound is.

Students discovered that when they strum their guitar quickly, the volume is loud. When they strum their guitar slowly, the volume is quiet. When they tighten the strings by holding their fingers down on them, the pitch is higher. When they loosen the strings by removing their fingers, then the pitch is lower.

Tuesday, 3 February 2015

Balzac Billy did not see his shadow! Hooray for an early spring. I hope he's right!

Here are some super cute Groundhogs that the students painted. We were learning to add a bit of shading to the groundhog, you will notice that most students were able to get a few different shades of brown incorporated. Some students even worked on shading in other parts of their painting too.

We have these hanging from the ceiling in our classroom. I love how each of the groundhogs has such a unique looking personality!

Sunday, 1 February 2015

Last week in science we tried a couple more fun experiments to deepen our understanding of hearing and sound.

Dancing Salt ~ We were talking about the ear drum and the fact that sound waves travel down the ear canal and cause the ear drum to vibrate. With our dancing salt experiment we tried to demonstrate what this might look like! First we made an "ear drum". We secured a piece of wax paper with an elastic band over the top of a jar. We placed salt on the wax paper. Then we made sounds by beating a drum. We saw that the sound waves caused the salt to vibrate and "dance" around. Sound is energy. Any material that vibrates makes waves (sound waves).

Balloon Vocal Cords ~ With this experiment we were trying to demonstrate how your throat vibrates to make sounds. Blow up a balloon (this is your lungs for the demonstration) pull the top of the balloon tight, and then let the air out. As the air escapes, the neck of the balloon (this is your vocal cords for this demonstration) vibrates back and forth. The result of this vibration is sound! When air pushes past your vocal cords, they vibrate and make sounds. Your voice makes sounds when air causes the vocal cords to vibrate.